Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Why study Buddhist texts on impermanence when I can just sit here and watch Thursday slip away?Sy Safransky

...the clouds drift by on an unseasonably hot day, and my cold enters its second week...coincidentally...I hope...just when the world’s been freaking out about swine flu...I’ll start worrying about that when the total number of deaths from the pandemic approach those from car crashes or cigarettes on the average day...

...the combination of last week’s rain and this week's high temperature seems to have made the buds explode like firecrackers...new green leaves, flowers, pollen everywhere...and last week’s fever gave way to this week’s stuffy, irritated nose...haven’t been to yoga class in over a week...done almost no writing...no biking...barely any walking...a little reading, but not much...a bit of deep thinking but, really, very little...

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

...I read something once...really, it’s not gonna get much more precise than that...this guy from I think a Middle Eastern country was mocking Mother's Day, saying "what? You have only one day a year to honor your mother?!”...and he kinda had a point...which brings me to Earth Day....

...anyway, as said mysterious illness feels me rather uninspired...not to mention grouchy...I’ll do some more recycling, and direct interested readers toward an early post (itself recycled from a yoga retreat some months earlier) called ...though it doesn’t love me... as well as something written after my more recent retreat, inspired by Marvin Gaye, the loss of a passport, and a whole lot of garbage washed up on a Mexican beach, called Mercy Mercy Me (Further Notes from Exile)...namaste for now...

Monday, April 20, 2009

...a while ago, most excellent yoga blogger Brooks wrote about an article in The Sun magazine by Wendell Berry called Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer...having read both, I left a comment...which, as my comments tend to do, veered away into rambling that had very little to do with what I was commenting on....now, in the spirit of Earth Day, I’m gonna recycle part of it here, while, as Yoga for Cynics posts tend to do, rambling on even further....

...I like to think of myself as a Luddite...with a blog and an ipod...but no air conditioning, and a cell phone that doesn’t take pictures or show movies...so can relate somewhat to a stodgy rejection of the digital age...seeing it as another expensive burden, another obstruction standing in the way of traditional human connections...even if it’s formed new kinds of connections as we converse effortlessly and instantly with people on the other side of the world...however many painful misunderstandings may ensue as we continue struggling to figure out the rules for a brave new radically smaller world...

....then, one could say the same of any technological innovation...including, certainly, the manual typewriters Luddite writers tend to be so proud of...as if the sages of old used them to write their sacred scriptures (note: they didn’t)...as well any form of mass communication...movable type, without a doubt...and, certainly, we can’t forget the invention of writing itself...I mean, just imagine: there was a time...for much of human beings’ tenure on earth, in fact...when a relatively close level of physical intimacy was required for any communication...to hear what another person thought, you would have to be close enough to hear that person’s voice...most likely looking into his or her face...and, chances are, you would rarely speak to anyone you hadn’t known for your or their whole life...all communication was close communication...

...then, if the invention of writing was alienating, it can’t have held a candle to the invention of words themselves...before which, I can only assume, communication must have been accomplished solely by facial expressions, and subtle—or not so subtle—gestures...and touching...no representing by phonemes or anything else...no abstraction at all...

Who needs action when you got words?the Meat Puppets

...was writing last week...for myself...had a point, to begin with, but ended up kinda listing everything I’d been up to, or thinking about...without really exploring anything...then started getting self-reflective...about how I was just catalonging stuff...was about to fix that...make it cataloging...but decided I liked it better the way it was...listing stuff in seeming aimlessness as an expressing of longing for...what?...something more meaningful to write about? something to come up in the list that’ll catch fire and glow with transcendent meaning? or, maybe, something that couldn’t be written about at all...but that I wanted to express nonetheless...leaving me nothing but catalonging...

...while writing, was listening to the Blood on the Tracks album...in Tangled Up in Blue it sounds like Dylan sings I murdered something underneath my breath rather than I muttered...and if so, would that mean he had something meaningful to express that not only couldn’t be said aloud, but shouldn’t, under pain of death?...it’d have to be shouldn’t...you don’t murder something just because it couldn’t...

Saturday, April 18, 2009

...the thing was, the first part of it...the interview segment...pretty much epitomized everything that’s foul and loathsome about reality TV in general and the American Idol type shows in particular...judges and audiences mocking someone who fails to fulfill their society’s incredibly narrow, superficial, and often unhealthy standards of beauty...licking their chops in anticipation of tearing her to shreds once she starts singing...all for the unforgivable crime of having the nerve to think she belongs on the same stage as the beautiful people...

To be born woman is to know-Although they do not talk of it at school-That we must labour to be beautiful.William Butler Yeats

...in simpler times all a person needed to be as beautiful as the folks on magazine covers was hundreds of thousands of dollars of plastic surgery and an eating disorder...now, things have gotten more difficult...replace labour with airbrush in that Yeats quote and you’ve got it...

Now is the winter of my discontent...Richard III (Bill Shakespeare)

we live in a culture of discontent...we’d be nothing without our discontent...most Americans are descended from people who crossed oceans because of discontent...moved west because of discontent...and now endlessly earn earn earn so they can buy buy buy because of discontent....the system wouldn’t work without it...without discontent we’d be oblivious to advertising...and, let’s face it, the economy would collapse in a way that would make these recent perturbations look like a penny falling down a sewer drain...

sometimes there’s no poison like a dreamTanya Donnelly

...I’ve always wanted to be a rock star...can’t think of any mode of existence that could compare to that...no, not cynical yoga blogger with a small but dedicated cult following...not even Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love....really, it seems like it'd be the fulfillment of...everything...howling out my deepest anguish to a crowd of adoring millions like Kurt Cobain or Janis Joplin...lolling in Viking-like decadence backstage like Gram Parsons, Keith Moon, or Jimi Hendrix...attaining cosmic trances in an electric haze of music and spirit like Bob Marley or Jerry Garcia...and that’s precisely why it’s probably best that, in all likelihood, it's never gonna happen...

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie sleekly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can't be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.Franz Kafka (totally stolen from Kim’s blog, where part of this post started out as a comment, as well) (and, actually, now that I think of it, another part came from a comment, which I saved, left on somebody else’s blog a long time ago, though I don’t remember what blog it was) (so it goes)

...there’s this huge hemlock tree in the woods...maybe twenty minutes away if I walk fast...just up from ever-tumbling Wissahickon Creek...it's leaning, at maybe a thirty degree angle, at the top of this kinda embankment-type hill that looks like it’s been crumbling for a long time, despite long-ago efforts to shore it up with a stone wall...a number of smaller trees and rocks looking like they’ve fallen somewhat recently...but its roots are gripping onto a big rock jutting out from the hillside....the question is, how strong is the tree’s grip? and how well anchored is the rock?

Roots are strong.Gary Snyder

...vrksasana...tree pose in English...involves balancing on one foot...a yoga teacher once told me it’s about staying rooted and confident, no matter how the winds might blow or how unsteady you might feel...

...in the courtyard of my building, there were four huge oaks, each at least a century old... forming a gigantic rectangle...a month or so ago, some men came and cut one of them down...no explanation....most likely, there was imminent danger of the tree falling on the building...and, no doubt, a tree that size could do a lot of damage...so I couldn’t complain...nonetheless, I feel sad whenever I see the stump there and realize that, even if somebody plants a seed tomorrow, it'll be at least a century...long after I'm dead and gone...before there'll be another one like it there...

...I wrote that a while ago...unrelated to trees or symmetry, last night I gave the management notice that I’m moving...just down the street, but moving nonetheless...

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

No human being should be considered beyond the reach of redemption.John Lewis

...went to see this movie called The Dhamma Brothers...no, that’s not the name of a southern rock band...though the movie does take place in the south, and contains music by bands like Sigur Ros....apparently dhamma’s an alternate spelling of dharma...and no, it’s probably not playing at or anywhere near your local multiplex...but you should go see it anyway...I make no bones about the fact that this is more like kind of a plug than kind of a review...

...that’s because this is probably the best film about prisoners...in terms of ringing true with my own experience working with maximum security convicts, as well as, more recently, parolees...that I’ve seen...though Shakespeare Behind Bars comes close....with this one, in the opening scenes, I experienced a touch of the feeling I’d get as the gates closed behind me every week...kinda like walking through the wardrobe into Narnia...except, instead of a magical land of talking animals and mythical creatures, I found myself in a terrible, grey world where people are kept in cages and an unending threat of violence seems to permeate the air...where words like correctional should be used only with the deepest sense of irony...

...the movie also gives as good a cinematic representation of non-religious Buddhist meditation as I’ve seen on film...as a group of hardened Alabama prisoners, many of them doing life sentences for murder, enter an in-house vipassana meditation retreat...nine days of sitting and silence... as one of the program’s leaders points out, vipassana means to see things as they are...during which they’re inevitably confronted with all of the anger and hurt that they’ve experienced...as well as all they’ve caused...

...and, after so much so-called true to life voyeuristic when-animals-attack style violence-porn like Oz...not to mention that a full one percent of the population of the United States is currently in prison...we desperately need depictions that’ll help foster a more intelligent and compassionate conversation...not to present some utopian fantasy in which everybody’s simply a victim of the system, but to portray people who, no matter how much pain they’ve caused to others and to themselves, are still, like any of us, more than their worst actions...as bad as those might be...

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Easter...theological arguments aside, it’s a time of rebirth...connected—call it a big coincidence if you want—along with all the pagan fertility symbol rabbits & eggs—to the vernal equinox...everything coming back to life...which would make it kinda the opposite for our friends in the southern hemisphere...but anyway...

...it was right around Easter two years ago when I decided I had to leave my lonely apartment outside of Ithaca, NY, and move to Philly...an area where I’d really never conceived of living again...the site of all my early—and not-so-early—failures...representing everything I’d been running away from ever since...even as it kept pulling me back...like Michael Corleone in Godfather III...okay, maybe nothing like that...but still...there were some lengthy periods in my 20’s...coming home broke and unsure of where to go next...working lousy temp jobs and hiding in the storage room upstairs to smoke weed listening to the Stones’ Black and Blue album every evening after work like a strange pathetic ritual...you’re just a memory of a love that used to be...after that, only a couple times a year to visit family, though at times things got so strained I didn’t wanna go at all, and sometimes didn’t...and to visit an old friend or two...but that was it...

...until everything changed in the summer of 2005, when my dad died suddenly...less than a week after I’d finished teaching my last college class...the day before August 15th, which I’d declared as day one of my new life writing full time, as I’d always wanted to do... in between, I’d visited with the family...had breakfast with mom and dad at a restaurant on the Cape May boardwalk on Saturday the 13th, when dad, not generally known for putting a positive spin on things, told me how excited he was that I was setting out into the unknown like this...like Walt Whitman: The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted, Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find...though neither of us knowing just how far from a safe, familiar harbor I was gonna get, or how soon....got the call the next day, while visiting friends on the way home...an urgent message left on my cell phone by my older brother while I was at the beach: call me tonight repeated a couple times with an unmistakable urgency...making clear that, whatever it was, I didn’t want to know, but needed to hear it anyway, as soon as possible...

...a year and half later, on Easter, mom, isolated and ailing, seemed to be tumbling downhill at an alarming rate...complaining incessantly about various physical problems, increasingly unsteady, memory disappearing fast, making clear more than once that she didn’t want to live many more years...and then, on Easter afternoon, when she finally rose from bed, things appeared suddenly to have gotten far worse...she couldn’t, it seemed, complete a full sentence, voice drifting off after a few words....my younger brother took her to the hospital, thinking maybe she’d had a stroke... I’m not sure what we ended up doing for Easter dinner...probably just fended for ourselves, taking whatever was in the fridge....I thought, and in retrospect was probably right, that she’d lapsed into a deep depression...not that I knew what to do about it...

...that was something I had a rather immediate familiarity with at the time....kayaking through the mangroves in Key West a month or two earlier hardly putting a dent in it...so overweight I couldn’t stand looking at pictures of myself from that trip...intense tension headaches every day...increasing amounts of ibuprofen every night, along with either a bottle of red wine or a six pack or two of Corona...and junk food, lots and lots of junk food...thinking I might need to start buying weed again, since being a stoner seemed preferable to descending into alcoholism...painfully lonely where I was living...barely any friends except long-distance, any romantic prospects seeming further and further out of reach...the big plans of a year or two before steadily crumbling into dust but no really promising ideas on the horizon...my life seeming in as inevitable and frightening a decline as my mother’s, if forty years earlier....really, I didn’t have much to lose in picking up and moving, even if it was to Philly...

Sitting here in limbo, waiting for the dice to rollSitting here in limbo, got some time to search my soulJimmy Cliff

...two years later, mom’s health problems are largely under control, even if her memory isn’t what it once was...and she’s a lot happier with two of her sons nearby, one of us at the house every weekend...a month or two after that Easter, I found an apartment and a friendly, reasonably healthy community in West Mt. Airy, State of Quiet Integration, USA...an easy train ride, or an eight mile bike ride through Fairmount Park along the Wissahickon Creek and Schuylkill River, to center city...a ten minute walk from the largest, wildest urban park in the world...got back into yoga shortly after arriving, a lot more seriously than before...finding through that a way to stop the tension headaches, as well cutting out the nightly boozing without reverting to old bad habits...in many ways healthier than I’ve ever been physically and...somewhat...mentally...still working on that...including gradually making peace with my past...as this blog attests three or four times a week...at Easter 2009, still in a transitional period that seems to go on and on, with no particularly solid end in sight...but coming to realize that’s not necessarily such a bad thing...

Saturday, April 11, 2009

...I actually managed to do camel pose—ustrasana for you yoga nerds out there—a kneeling backbend where you touch your heels with your fingers for everybody else...I don’t know why it’s called camel pose....some asanas make perfect sense, like downward facing dog...which the average dog does at least once every morning...except that dogs actually tend to look up rather than down while doing it...which could be an issue if your yoga teacher happens to be a dog...otherwise, it’s all good...

you can be active with the activists, or sleep in with the sleeperswhen you’re waiting for the great leap forward...Billy Bragg

...anyway was particularly surprising since I’d never even come close before...at best ended up in some lopsided Quasimodo-like contortion, one shoulder way down there, one way up there...saw actually getting both way down there as one of those things where, if I keep up this yoga thing diligently for like the next ten years...maybe...and, at the very least, expected it’d be a millimeter-by-millimeter type thing...and yet, here was this great leap forward...or downward...or something...like something just suddenly decided to let go...funny how that happens...

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.G. K. Chesterton

...often I think about what I’d change if I could take an excursion backwards, into the past...as documented a couple posts ago...the trouble with that being that there might not be any more myself to come back to...or a myself different enough to make the entire point moot...maybe a myself I wouldn’t like so much...smug...shallow...complacent...a casual bully....might I feel less need to stand up for the underdog if I’d never been one? Or have an overweening sense of entitlement that’d cause me to look on those less fortunate with indifference or contempt? Would more successful relationships make me afraid of being alone?

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.Matthew 19:24

...what I’m wondering is: have you ever actually seen a camel try to go through the eye of a needle? There could be some trick to it that only camels know...

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Live from the High Point Cafe, West Mt. Airy, State of Mild Post-Yoga Retreat Malaise

...one thing I’ve learned is that the professional therapy world is pretty weird...like, the way people come to essentially the same gig from so many directions...medical school for psychiatrists, different kinds of degree programs for psychologists and social workers, rabbinical school, divinity school, yoga teacher training, or just working one’s way through volunteer social service work...for the writing or poetry therapy angles often English or creative writing or theatre degrees...meaning, apparently, I’m already qualified....then, if the gig we’re talking about is simply listening to people with empathy and understanding, it’s probably an area where nobody truly has expertise, though we all do, to varying degrees....

if you realize you are not there, that means you are thereChogyam Trungpa

...reading these books about using writing to work through trauma can be difficult...since it’s hard to stay objective in thinking about these write about your most traumatic experience kinds of exercises...I’ve written about that stuff, but probably not enough...ever fearing, perhaps, that death is in the details...

I chose poetry and the metaphor not for the love of mystery or elusiveness but because that comes closer to the way we experience things deep down. Explicitness and directness cannot be applied to our psychic life. They are not subtle enough.Anais Nin

...one book I stopped reading took this incredibly dry, anal-retentive text-book approach to using poetry as therapy...I thought, jeezus, anybody who can write a book like this has no business using poetry for anything...then, at one point, my attention was caught by a bit on working with prisoners...until I read something like the purpose of working with prisoners is to teach them to conform to society’s norms...and thought that might be your purpose, buddy...

Won’t you recognize us? We’re everything you hate...Lou Reed

...when I tutor recovering addicts in preparation for taking the GED, I don’t hide the fact that I think that the GED, like all other standardized tests, is awful...particularly in the case of interpretive questions...basically if you think too much about the passage or the questions...or, worse yet, use your imagination...think at all about the possibilities of meaning, rather than going for the easiest, essentially rote answer...you’re going to get it wrong...so I tell them: since these tests supposedly are about seeing how smart you are, you’d think they’d reward you for thinking about things, using your imagination or creativity, but in fact they punish you for that...nonetheless, as these tests are, unfortunately, important in our society at this time, it’s necessary to learn their rules...learn them, that is, while knowing that they’re stupid, and ultimately test very little other than one’s ability to follow rules....the important thing is to know what society’s norms are...learn how to use them rather than being used by them...

...was talking to a friend while walking to dinner in Mexico about the Yoga Sutras...she didn’t like the part about abstinence...I don’t either...then, I don’t particularly care...

...not that I’ve got anything against Patanjali...whoever he was...just don’t see any reason why disagreeing with something somebody etched on parchment in India thousands of years ago should be a problem...any more than if it was written in Philadelphia yesterday...or vice-versa...

believe it if you need it; if you don’t just pass it on...Robert Hunter

...for every love thy neighbor there’s an injunction to kill thy neighbor for one highly spiritual reason or other...for every ancient discipline of self-realization, there’s an even older caste system that labels some inherently holy, and others untouchable...for every life-saving medical procedure there’s a new weapon of mass murder...for every nice modern idea like democracy, there’s a nasty one like fascism....neither tradition nor innovation is inherently good or bad...valid or invalid...wise or stupid...

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time—or even knew selflessness or courage or literature—but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.Annie Dillard

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Our capacity to make peace with another person and with the world depends very much on our capacity to make peace with ourselves.Thich Nhat Hanh

I have only three enemies. My favorite enemy, the one most easily influenced for the better, is the British Empire. My second enemy, the Indian people, is far more difficult. But my most formidable opponent is a man named Mohandas K. Gandhi. With him I seem to have very little influence.Gandhi

....this friend of mine told me about how, coming back from month-long yoga retreats she’s found herself unable to relate to her own name....I said I’m always like that....I don’t think this is a sign of my enlightenment, though, impending completed, or any which way...then, I don’t think either my name or who I really am means anything...or if it does it means something just this second and it’ll mean something else in the next....somebody, I think it might’ve been Thich Nhat Hanh, said we die with every outbreath and we’re born again with every inbreath...actually, maybe he didn’t say that...maybe it was somebody else...maybe it was me...

...anyway, I was thinking of that recently... the rebirth thing...not reincarnation in any literal sense but the sense that we can start again, at least in an internal sense...no, I don’t think I can shirk responsibility for ugly words and actions of the past...but maybe I can no longer be the person who needed to say and do them....there’s that song where Lou Reed talks about the possibility of becoming a father and says it might be fun to have a kid I could pass on to something more than rage pain anger and hurt...never mind the redundancy...I’m wondering what I’m passing on to myself...what I can pass on to myself...what I can not pass on to myself...

...I tend to be hung up on the past...my biggest regret about my adolescence is that I wasn’t more violent...really...seriously....if I had it to do over again, I’d break some bones...but endless violence inside myself can’t be my reality now...I don’t want it to be....I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen for maybe fifteen years over Indian food a month or so ago...she said she thought we were both a lot nicer than we used to be...I agreed...not as good looking but much nicer people...it’d be great to have an eighteen year old body but no way would I ever want to have an eighteen year old mind again...there’s only so much suffering a person can take....actually, that’s not true...one thing I learn working with recovering addicts is that people can suffer more than you can imagine...and yet keep trying to get well....I find that inspiring....somebody who’s been molested, beaten, abused in every way by criminals and law enforcement both and is still there has something to teach about the possibilities of rebirth...

Saturday, April 4, 2009

...the weather is always suspect...having well earned its reputation as what we generally talk about when there’s nothing to talk about...

...nonetheless...after nine days of wearing neither shoes nor socks...sandals only twice...I found myself back in the northeast...the cruelest month coming in distressingly cruel...dark, cold, and wet...outside and, in a day or two, seeping into my all-too porous brain...but...

...took advantage of a break in the rain this afternoon to take a bike ride to the Good Karma Cafe...actual name...downtown...where I got a mango smoothie...tasting kinda like the tropics...West Mt. Airy through a bit of Germantown to the path along Wissahickon Creek down to the Schuylkill River trail...having to stop under a bridge during a sudden downpour halfway...then on to see a gigantic rainbow over the city, by the Art Museum... yeah, where Rocky ran up the steps...

...a rainbow is, of course, an overburdened metaphor on the level of snakes, flags, or gods...but worse....at least I didn’t mention unicorns...or Judy Garland...though, if I did, I’d probably bring up her drug problem....I’m like that...even if I can’t deny all the new and glistening green...

Thursday, April 2, 2009

...some people appear to have found recent Yoga for Cynics posts confusing....that might be a good thing...or maybe not...I’m rather confused about the matter...

Confusion is next and next after that is the truth...Sonic Youth

...the last four posts were mostly written while yoga retreating in Mexico...the exception being the Marvin Gaye one, which was mostly written by hand while waiting for a train to take me home from the Philly airport....like last year's retreat, which inspired the creation of this blog, this one included writing workshops led by legendary writer/performer/teacher/holy lunatic Ann Randolph , in which I found myself rhapsodizing about things like...y’know...Vikings walking on water, and how the Hulk manages to keep his waistband intact...with some more serious soul-searching stirred in...which can get confusing...then, maybe confusion is the point...

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.Salvador Dali

...I find these days I’m opening more and more to my deep inner weirdness...as normalcy is always and ever nothing more or less than a social construct, you’re never gonna get in touch with yourself until you learn to embrace your deep inner weirdness...even if that’s, ultimately, a social construct, too...and my deep inner weirdness is very deep and weird...can anyone reading this disagree?

If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.Tom Peters

...I’ve always found it strange the way people take statements like truth cannot be known and hold them up as truths that they, in fact, know beyond a shadow of a doubt...even I don’t know, it seems to me, needs to be spoken with some degree of skepticism...unless I’m confused...I mean, what if you do know and are simply too confused to know you know?

he who knows does not speak and he who speaks does not knowLao Tzu

...I suspect that Lao Tzu knew he was being inherently contradictory...and therefore inherently confusing...and that may have been his point...he wasn’t offering something to repeat in a wise voice to one’s acolytes...but something by which to be confused...so that one might eventually learn to live more comfortably in confusion...or maybe I’m just confused...

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

If they had a king of fools then I would wear that crown,and you could all die laughing because I’ll wear it proudly...Elvis Costello

Chapter 18, in which many events transpire, none of them of any importance whatsoever...the Vikings walked on water again this afternoon...big whoop...I don’t know why we put up with them...okay, actually, I do...they’re Vikings for Chrissake...if they wanna bore the hell out of the whole neighborhood insisting we watch them walk on water every afternoon, it sure beats being raped and pillaged...still, not exactly the way I wanted to spend my time...I came to Tulum for a yoga retreat...not this, not at all...apparently the spiritual crowd welcomed the Vikings at first...I mean, what the hell...they could walk on water...how much more spiritual than that can you get? And then the crazed brown bunnies came, in the wake of the Vikings...crazed brown bunnies, it turns out, often come in the wake of Vikings....and they started picking dandelions and tossing them in the air whenever the Vikings appeared on the beach...which wouldn’t have been a problem, except that dandelions really aren’t native to Mexico at all, at least not this part of Mexico...where the hell did the rabbits find them? The rabbis, I almost wrote there...actually, I did, but changed it...the rabbis are an issue I don’t like to talk about much....they were a problem, too...really, it really had nothing to do with their being rabbis, but they sure didn’t get along with Jesus or Mohammed...I think the problem with Jesus came when they first met him and said “step down off your pedestal, Jesus, you’re just another rabbi, like the rest of us.” “No I’m not,” said Jesus, “I’m Jesus.” I’m not even gonna go into what Mohammed said about that...Buddha, meanwhile, had a lot of different opinions since, y’know, everybody’s the Buddha except we don’t all realize it...I’m told that even rocks are the Buddha...what happens if you break a rock in half, though?...do you get two Buddhas? Is it like mitosis or whatever the hell they called in back in 10th grade biology class?...god, that teacher was an asshole...but this isn’t a book about him...and, anyway, the red birds that might’ve been planes but didn’t really look like much of either were everywhere that afternoon, as well...the eyes kept looking down on them but didn’t care...personally, I didn’t care about any of that...I didn’t have to look up...who the hell needs to look up when there’s so much interesting down, forwards, and sideways? The Vikings, though, they were a real problem...a real problem....and not just because of their cheesy walking on the water stunt...you ever smell a Viking?...seriously, you don’t want to...and you sure don’t ever wanna eat enchiladas de mole sitting next to three of them...but I hadn’t had lunch without Vikings in nearly three weeks...and this didn’t make my life one of contentment and/or joy...